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Updated: June 29, 2025
For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu to-day is surely a worshipper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long as the world lasts there will be sun-worshippers. Every brown man upon the Nile is one, and every good American who crosses the ocean and comes at last into the sombre wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the deck of the Loulia.
Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, and Tripoli all abound in dolmens and other monuments. Even in the Nile Valley they occur, for what looks like a dolmen surrounded by a circle was discovered by de Morgan in the desert near Edfu, and Wilson and Felkin describe a number of simple dolmens which exist near Ladò in the Sudan. Tripoli remains as yet comparatively unexplored.
In any case, at the dawn of connected Egyptian history, we find two main centres of civilization in Egypt, Heliopolis and Buto in the Delta in the North, and Edfu and Hierakonpolis in the South.
I think of the most lovely buildings I know in Europe of the Alhambra at Granada, of the Cappella Palatina in the palace at Palermo. And Edfu I place with them Edfu utterly different from them, more different, perhaps, even than they are from each other, but akin to them, as all great beauty is mysteriously akin.
The legend of the coming of Hathor from Ta-neter may refer to some such wandering, and we know that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom communicated with the Land of Punt, not by way of the Red Sea coast as Hatshepsut did, but by way of the Upper Nile. This would tally well with the march of the Mesniu northwards from Edfu to their battle with the forces of Set at Dendera.
The columns which surround the first court at Edfû rise straight from their plinths. The shaft always tapers towards the top. It is finished by three or five flat bands, one above the other.
He visited Edfu, whose temple had pylons a hundred and fifty feet high, and which possessed an immense library of papyruses, and on the walls of which were written and depicted, as it were, an encyclopedia of the geography, astronomy, and theology of that period.
At the Ramesseum, at Edfû, at Philae, at Denderah, at Ombos, at Esneh, the depths of the firmament seemed to open to the eyes of the faithful, revealing the dwellers therein. There the celestial ocean poured forth its floods navigated by the sun and moon with their attendant escort of planets, constellations, and decani; and there also the genii of the months and days marched in long procession.
To me, Edfu must always represent the world-worship of "the Hidden One"; not Amun, god of the dead, fused with Ra, with Amsu, or with Khnum: but that other "Hidden One," who is God of the happy hunting-ground of savages, with whom the Buddhist strives to merge his strange serenity of soul; who is adored in the "Holy Places" by the Moslem, and lifted mystically above the heads of kneeling Catholics in cathedrals dim with incense, and merrily praised with the banjo and the trumpet in the streets of black English cities; who is asked for children by longing women, and for new dolls by lisping babes; whom the atheist denies in the day, and fears in the darkness of night; who is on the lips alike of priest and blasphemer, and in the soul of all human life.
"Her room was next to Lady Statham in some hotel or other at Assouan or Edfu, and one night she woke and heard a kind of mysterious chanting or intoning next her. Hotel doors are so dreadfully thin. There was a funny smell too, like incense of something sickly, and a man's voice kept chiming in. It went on for hours, while she lay terrified in bed " "Frightened, you say?" asked Henriot.
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